Parish Council News Update – December 2024

Letter from the Chairman

Dear Villagers,

The frost has covered the fields and gardens and winter has overtaken the falling leaves of autumn. The Christmas season is nearly upon us and by the time you read this, the new year will be around the corner. But as the darkness of shortened days descends upon us, your Parish Council works just as long hours. Planning work continues, gritting reviews have become a daily task, budget and grant reviews are ongoing, airports and air traffic meetings gather pace and we have been planning for the annual Carols in the Crescent event. By the time you read this, many of these activities will have concluded and will be reported on in the next issue of the Woldingham Magazine.

Gritting.

Our gritter has been out a number of times this winter – even before the actual season commenced. As a reminder, your Parish Council contracts with Church Farm Services to grit all the privately maintained roads in the village, whereas Surrey County Council Highways grits all the publicly maintained roads. We have a small Councillor snow patrol team monitoring the weather daily to determine whether to grit. If you have any issues or need to alert us to anything, please email our clerk Karen at parish.clerk@woldingham.com or call me on 07779134797.

Chalkpit quarry housing estate application.

The long-standing application for a housing estate, lodged with Surrey County Council in September 2023 by Southern Gravel, to vary their minerals license and build 75 houses, is still in process. Additional technical details have been submitted and a new consultation opened, although SCC did not formally notify the Woldingham Parish Council. Other colleagues in the District and County did, however. Notification was formally given on the 21st of November and the consultation closes on the 21st of December. This is an application that asks to terminate early the quarry minerals licence in order to build a large housing estate in the AONB. We meanwhile wait with baited breath to understand how the upcoming changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, promised to be launched by Christmas, impact proposed development in the AONB. The next steps and timing of the application process are as yet unclear.

Speedwatch.

From Speedwatch leader Jeremy Wormington: “The current Speedwatch team has now be active for exactly a year, while November was a quieter month after all the activity in October, when we welcomed a couple of new volunteers to the team. As with the previous month we continued to monitor Station Road and saw a quite dramatic improvement with speeding vehicles dropping by 40%, with those exceeding 45mph from nearly twenty to one. We are currently waiting on approval for more sites on lower Station Road and also Slines Oak Road.

We often get passers-by thanking the team for monitoring the traffic, and occasionally get residents who, while supportive, like to tell us where we should be located. The village should remember that we are all volunteers who give an hour of our time each week to support residents views around speeding traffic in the village. We are keen to monitor more widely, but if we are to do this then we need more volunteers. Please don’t criticise…..kindly volunteer.”

Thanks to Jeremy and all the Speedwatch volunteers for the many hours you give to help address speeding in our village.
And as a reminder, volunteers have a one-off training and then work under the supervision of local police. Local police can issue warnings and visit repeat offenders. There is evidence that the presence of Speedwatch and the threat of police intervention helps people moderate speed. If you are available a reasonable number of weeks in the year, or even every other week, and interested in helping, please email our clerk Karen at parish.clerk@woldingham.com.

Monthly Council meetings.

Your Parish Council meets monthly at 7:30pm on the last Wednesday of every month in the Village Hall (and in in the Peace Hall in July), except December and August. The public are always welcome. If you would like to speak on any topic, please advise our clerk Karen at parish.clerk@woldingham.com and you will be invited to speak at the beginning of the meeting. Agendas are published at least 5 days in advance on the website and the noticeboard but please do advise us if there is anything that you would like the Council to address.

Wishing you all good tidings and cheer,
Chairman Deborah Sherry

Our Carbon Footprint

It’s the New Year! It’s a time full of good intentions and resolutions… but how many of those involve the really important stuff, such as reducing your carbon footprint?

A carbon footprint is the amount of carbon dioxide a person, household, activity, or organisation emits over a year, and it’s significant because carbon dioxide is considered the most dangerous and prevalent greenhouse gas, trapping heat and preventing the earth from cooling itself off. Unfortunately, Woldingham has been calculated to have a significantly higher carbon footprint than the national average – each Woldingham household creates an average of 16.5 tonnes (!) of CO2 emissions per year, compared to 12.6 tonnes per average UK household. That’s roughly 30% more environmental impact per household, which seems crazy – especially when we have the potential and the choice to do something about it.

From an organisational level, in April 2023 Woldingham Parish Council agreed and adopted a Climate Emergency policy, and since joining the parish council I’ve been working to identify what more we need to do to reduce Woldingham’s carbon footprint and protect the environment. To this end we are moving towards creating and implementing a comprehensive Climate and Nature plan which we will of course share once it’s finalised.

And from an individual level, there is so much we can do, too.

We can model an environmental conscience to our children and grandchildren. We can encourage change in our workplaces. And we can be more mindful of our day-to-day habits in order to reduce our carbon outputs – whether it be recycling more, walking sometimes instead of always driving, using fewer chemicals, eating local produce where possible, educating ourselves about the social and environmental impact of fast fashion, buying less plastic, using electric garden tools instead of polluting petrol ones, reducing food waste, thinking twice before printing that document…

Needless to say, it’s not just about our carbon footprints either. It’s about creating safe spaces for wildlife and helping our local flora and fauna to survive and maybe even thrive. About proactively encouraging biodiversity What about creating a rewilded space for nature in your garden? Digging a wildlife pond? Stopping using chemicals (weedkillers, pesticides, even some fertilisers which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions) in our gardens and using wildlife-friendly alternatives? Extending No-Mow May into June or even July?

The list of what we can do to be more environmentally-minded is, of course, endless and potentially quite daunting. And, let’s face it – we can’t all do everything!

But maybe, if we all just picked a few things that we feel we can realistically start doing and keep up for at least the next 12 months, then that would be a step in the right direction.

So – Happy New Year! What resolutions will YOU be making?

Councillor Cat Neave